Pharaohs & Pyramids

Welcome to Cairo, one of the oldest and most overwhelming cities on earth.
It has been said that he who has not seen Cairo has not seen the world, and the first impression of the city tends to confirm it. The Nile slides through the centre, 5,000-year-old monuments anchor every horizon and the sound and energy of 20 million people going about their lives fills every street. Check in to your hotel and let Cairo begin to work on you. Tomorrow, the pyramids.

Today you stand in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza, the only Wonder of the Ancient World still standing, and nothing quite prepares you for the scale of it.
The Great Pyramid was the tallest structure on earth for almost 4,000 years. The Sphinx crouches at the base of the plateau with the desert stretching south behind it. Your included excursion with a Viking Egyptologist gives the monuments their full historical context, and the option to see them from the back of a camel is one that should not be declined. In the afternoon, the Egyptian Museum’s collection of Tutankhamun’s treasures and royal mummies is one of the most remarkable concentrations of ancient artefacts anywhere in the world.

Cairo’s Islamic old city is one of the most extraordinary urban environments on earth, and a full day walking its streets is a journey through twelve centuries of continuous history.
Muizz Street, one of the oldest streets in the world, runs between the 11th-century gates of Bab al-Futuh and Bab Zuweila through a continuous procession of mosques, mausoleums, palaces and merchant houses that have barely changed since the Fatimid dynasty built this city in 969 AD. The Khan el-Khalili bazaar has been trading since 1382, and a glass of mint tea in one of its traditional cafes, with the call to prayer echoing across the rooftops, is the kind of afternoon that stays with people for decades.

A short flight south brings you to Luxor, widely considered the world’s greatest open air museum, where your ship awaits on the Nile.
The ancient city of Thebes spread across both banks of the river here for three thousand years, and the scale of what remains is almost incomprehensible. The Temples of Luxor and Karnak on the east bank are linked by the Avenue of the Sphinxes. On the west bank, the Valley of the Kings hides the tombs of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs in the cliffs above the desert. Board your Viking Nile ship this afternoon as the feluccas drift past under a copper sky.

Qena has been a trading crossroads since ancient times, and its greatest treasure is just a short drive from the riverbank.
The Temple of Dendera is one of the best-preserved ancient Egyptian temples in the country, its stone gate and towering hypostyle columns still adorned with vivid hieroglyphs after two thousand years. The famous Dendera zodiac ceiling, an early representation of the constellations carved in the first century BC, is one of the most celebrated images in Egyptology. The Sheikh el-Qenawi Mosque in the city centre reflects a very different but equally rich strand of Qena’s long history.

Today belongs entirely to the west bank, where the Valley of the Kings has been yielding its secrets for over two centuries and is still not finished.
The royal tombs cut deep into the limestone cliffs here are among the most decorated spaces ever created by human hands, their walls covered in painted texts and images of the afterlife in colours that still dazzle after three thousand years. Queen Nefertari’s tomb in the Valley of the Queens is one of the finest. The Temple of Hatshepsut, carved directly into the cliff face above the valley, is extraordinary from any angle. And the Karnak temple complex on the east bank, with its 136 columns each 23 metres high, is one of the largest religious structures ever built.

Esna is one of the most distinctive stops on the Nile, where the ship passes through the Esna Lock and a colourful street market lines both sides of the channel as you wait.
The vendors and their goods are a tradition as old as river travel here: carpets, brassware, embroidered fabrics and mother-of-pearl keepsakes carried to the ship by small boats. The Temple of Khnum, half-buried beneath the modern town, emerges to reveal a Roman Hypostyle Hall from the 1st century AD, its 24 columns topped with intricately carved capitals and its walls painted with images of Roman emperors making offerings to Egyptian gods. It is one of the most unexpected temple interiors in Egypt.

Aswan is the most beautiful city on the Nile, and a full day here gives you time to understand why it has been a destination rather than just a stopover for thousands of years.
The granite boulders of the first cataract break the river’s surface south of the city, the desert closes in on both sides and the Nubian villages on Elephantine Island glow in terracotta and blue across the water. A felucca ride to the Temple of Philae, relocated stone by stone to save it from the rising waters of Lake Nasser after the High Dam was built in the 1970s, is one of the most remarkable stories of international archaeological rescue. The Aswan spice market is extraordinary for both its fragrance and its variety.

A second day in Aswan rewards those who venture beyond the main sites and into the quieter corners of the city and its islands.
The Nubian Museum’s collection of artefacts, textiles and reconstructed village interiors is among the finest in Egypt. The ancient granite quarries where the obelisks and temple columns were hewn from solid rock, including the famous Unfinished Obelisk abandoned in the stone when a crack appeared, give a visceral understanding of the scale of Egyptian construction. An optional excursion to Abu Simbel, Ramesses II’s colossal cliff temples on Lake Nasser, is one of the most extraordinary journeys in Egypt and is strongly worth considering from Aswan.

The Temple of Horus at Edfu is the most completely preserved ancient Egyptian temple in existence, and standing inside it feels closer to the ancient world than almost anywhere else on this voyage.
Built between 237 and 57 BC, the temple’s design deliberately echoed much older structures, preserving the forms and proportions of pharaonic architecture at the very moment that Greek influence was transforming Egypt. The towering entrance pylon, the colonnaded courtyard and the dark inner sanctuary where the golden statue of Horus once stood are all intact. The mythology surrounding Edfu, where Horus battled Seth to avenge his father Osiris, adds a layer of story that the Viking Egyptologist guides bring vividly to life.

The Nile has carried you through 4,000 years of human history over the past seven nights, and it is not easily left behind.
Disembark at Luxor and fly north to Cairo for your final night in Egypt. The Khan el-Khalili souk, one of the oldest and largest markets in the Middle East, has been trading continuously since 1382 and makes the ideal farewell to Egypt. Its labyrinth of covered passages sell everything from spices and silver to hand-blown glass and handwoven textiles, and the traditional coffee houses tucked into its inner alleyways are exactly where the final evening should be spent.

Your 12-day journey through ancient and modern Egypt draws to a close today.
Your transfer to Cairo International Airport departs this morning. From the Pyramids of Giza to the Valley of the Kings, from the Temple of Karnak to the spice market of Aswan, Egypt leaves most of its visitors with a single certainty: they will return.